The following background information may present examples of specific aspects of the prior art (e.g., without limitation, approaches, facts, or common wisdom) that, while expected to be helpful to further educate the reader as to additional aspects of the prior art, is not to be construed as limiting the present invention, or any embodiments thereof, to anything stated or implied therein or inferred thereupon.
Electronic trading for fixed income products has existed since the late 90's and continues to grow today. Existing applications in the market allow bond investors to ask bond dealers for quotes electronically and without having to pick up a phone. To a lesser extent, some applications post executable prices and if a matching order is found, these applications provide a means by which a transaction may be executed. There are three major characteristics of existing electronic bond trading systems, and they are steaming quotes, auto-execute matched orders and client application.
Streaming quotes represent the ability for an application to push live market prices to users (push technology) when the underlying market changes, allowing the user to see the latest prices. An alternate to push technology exists where the market prices may change, but the change is not be provided to the user unless the user asks for a quote refresh (pull technology). Existing applications use either push or pull technology.
Auto-execute matched orders represents how a trading system handles two matching orders (a “buy” order and a “sell” order). Typically, existing systems need to confirm orders with the order originator before providing execution. Confirmation of an order is normally needed by existing systems since existing systems are often slower in response time and a human confirmation of orders is needed to prevent errors.
Client application represents how a user can access an application server over an Internet connection. This can be accomplished in two ways. The first is by downloading a client application on to a user's computer and installing that application to provide the user with access to the application server. The second is by accessing the server application via an Internet web browser.
In view of the foregoing, it is clear that these traditional techniques are not perfect and leave room for more optimal approaches.
Unless otherwise indicated illustrations in the figures are not necessarily drawn to scale.